PASADENA, Calif. (NASA/JPL-Caltech PR) — This month marks 25 years since scientists first produced a fifth state of matter, which has extraordinary properties totally unlike solids, liquids, gases and plasmas. The achievement garnered a Nobel Prize and changed physics.

A new study in the journal Nature builds on that legacy. In July 2018, NASA’s Cold Atom Lab  became the first facility to produce that fifth state of matter, called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), in Earth orbit.